Description
Book SynopsisBritish society is increasingly divided into the haves and the have-nots. Housing epitomizes this division with spiralling rents, exorbitant prices, lack of council provision, poorly maintained stock, and polluted cities with ever decreasing green space. Daniel Renwick and Robbie Shilliam provide a recent history of squalor culminating in the Grenfell Tower fire. In doing so they reveal a profound political failure to provide fair and just solutions to shelter – the most basic of human needs. Renwick and Shilliam argue that agents of change exist within those populations presently damned by a racist and class-riven system of housing provision.
Trade ReviewIn this compelling history of squalor’s political and racial construction, Renwick and Shilliam debunk right-wing attempts to cast today’s squalid living conditions forced on many across the UK as a matter of morality and show them to be one of mortality. This is perhaps most poignantly exposed in their discussion of the Grenfell Fire, a touchpoint throughout the book. A truly significant contribution to the contemporary rethinking of one of Beveridge’s five impediments to social progress.
-- Gurminder Bhambra, Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, University of Sussex
A thought-provoking, foundational history of housing policy and development within the United Kingdom... a must in the academic arsenal of an undergraduate or postgraduate student.
-- Capital & Class
A gripping read, Squalor powerfully describes the long-term historical processes that have shaped deprivation in our time. Left me feeling madly angry.
-- Arun Kundnani, author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror
Squalor is a beautifully-written collaboration unified by the authors’ clear commitment to acknowledging, documenting and detailing the organised and in many cases, purposeful negligence of Britain’s working classes. But its key achievement is its engagement with a particular aspect of political education that focuses on the evolution of regulations, which plainly demonstrate that housing, or the right to a dignified life in one’s home, should be the ultimate unifier of the polity. This is a book which illuminates exactly why everyone should be paying attention to the politics of housing.
-- Chantelle Jessica Lewis, Pembroke College, University of Oxford
This brilliant work treads the trajectory of spatial arrangement in granular detail, and skillfully dispels several key myths along the journey. It concretizes the macro decisions, taken at the highest levels of political office, that have continually reordered the nitty-gritty micro level of day-to-day life across the century. This is an indispensable resource in the attritional war for the human right to safe and secure housing.
-- Lowkey, hip hop artist and journalist
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. A moral history of squalor
2. Housing policy and national reform
3. A postwar consensus?
4. Demolishing slums, building up
5. The struggle for the city
6. The right to buy
7. Organized negligence
8. Twenty-first-century squalor
9. Social murder
